The ‘Lunar Library’ started its journey to outer space late February on a robotic lunar lander called Beresheet launched by SpaceX. The archive, which is housed on a metal disc about the size of a DVD, was created by the Arch Mission Foundation, a Los Angeles-based non-profit. The archive is intended to preserve records of human civilization for at least 6 billion years.
The 200GB of data contained on the archive includes tens of thousands of fiction and non-fiction books, the entire English-language contents of Wikipedia, textbooks, a full reference library and some Israeli songs and children’s drawings. Language translation tools and instructions on how to access and decode the information is also written onto the disc.
“For the survival of our species, we need to find ways to raise our awareness of what worked and didn’t work, and we need to ensure it is shared with the people of the future,” Nova Spivack, co-founder of Arch Mission Foundation, told NBC in an email.
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